The plague virus has killed over 99% of the human population. This devastation offers a unique opportunity for the survivors to rebuild their civilization from the ground up. The Stand ponders the question of what sort of society is best suited to ensure the happiness of all its citizens. Glen is the character most closely aligned with speculations of this kind. He says, “Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home” (458).

Glen and Stu are both deeply suspicious of the trappings of society. Population increase demands a more complex bureaucracy to govern it. With complexity comes corruption. The narrative endorses the idea of a village council as the ideal way for a society to function. This mechanism becomes possible while Boulder only has several hundred inhabitants but grows increasingly impractical once that population swells into the thousands. Stu and Frannie solve the problem for themselves by leaving the Free Zone, but this doesn’t resolve the fundamental dilemma. Does population growth inevitably lead to corruption?

The novel suggests that there are two types of people in the world—those who attracted to freedom and those attracted to order.